One of the worst band names ever, attached to a pretty darn tootin’ bunch of jumbled up styles which really does sound as much like T.V. on the Radio as people say, although it’s more like a great other band playing a lost TVOTR album, that is to say, it’s really the songwriting which bears a resemblance, and speaking of resemblance it must be noted that most of said comparisons to said band are based less on said songwriting than on each band being an experimenting rock band largely composed of people of African descent, but the instrumentation and production approach are, while varied and interesting in each band, very different, and although I never love this album when I listen to it, I keep returning to it, so I must like it more than I realize, with a cool whistle in the first track.
Now they have a new one out, but here’s the old one, which has been floating around for a year or so: at lala.com.
Phish is a great band that has some real jams, but I would rather hear Phish do a covers album, or a kids album. Their songwriting, or to be precise the breadth and depth of their point of view in their songs, remains woefully inadequate for the audience they address. Every time I hear them I understand that Hunter/Garcia was really the Dead’s beast of burden, carrying them through all those years.
This concert strikes me as really odd sounding. It’s like listening to a really good band playing a bunch of songs they’ve never heard before. Jones’s voice is by far the most interesting thing happening, but the songs are so light and, really, almost unsophisticated that it’s not really enough to just have a singer. Of course, a voice is not a singer, and maybe Nina Simone could have found more in these songs. Perhaps Jones is just distracted by the odd fit between band and song.
Grizzly Bear has taken a real step here towards mainstreaming an esthetic fairly well laid out by Robert Wyatt. This is an album that will probably turn up on the sound system at Starbucks at some point, but plenty of it is coming out of a tradition of pretty droney, spooked, playfully odd music. It’s bittersweet to behold, like a child growing up.
The place where this surpasses Animal Collective’s recent effort is in its sonics, its rhythmic stability, its production values in general. The A.C. has songs, though, which this album does not.
Geez. Bill Callahan is bringing it these days. This song is like finding your dad’s old set of blacksmith tools at the bottom of the lake where you camped in summers, and realizing that he dumped them after you burnt yourself, fooling around when he was gone one day. It’s fun to hear BC as a singer.
It’s from a compilation of people covering songs by Kath Bloom.
I always assumed that The Toasters were a great band which I just never listened to much, for some reason. I think they did that song “Party At Ground Zero”, which was pretty good, although I guess they’ve retired it now, especially being from New York City and all. Oh, did I mention they are from New York City? The singer let this factoid slip about 15 times during the show. He also couldn’t decide if he was in Phoenix or Tempe, so he had to sing “Arizona” every time the name of a place was required for his madlib songwriting approach.
The Toasters just don’t have any songs. It’s so strange to see a band play an entire show without playing a single good song. “Don’t Let the Bastards Bring You Down” is not too bad, but that was the only decent song in a set that, granted, was probably just barely an hour long. It is strange, and it is frustrating.
Their chief virtue is that they play at a steady tempo.
I saw The English Beat play last year, and may I be so bold as to claim that The English Beat beat the shit out of The Toasters. Dave Wakeling is frankly about as good as John Lennon at writing songs, and at singing them for that matter. His band, which it must be noted is a group of guns for hire (as is The Toasters), was incredibly well rehearsed. They stopped, they started. They full stopped, they full started. Hearing “I Confess” with a bunch of wildly gyrating fanatics, I felt part of a just and true celebration.
The strange thing about The English Beat is that the “band” still tours both America and Britain, but in completely different formations. What’s up with that?
I saw The Voodoo Glow Skulls and some ratty band from San Diego open. The VGS are pretty good, but don’t these guys ever grow up? Seeing some 40 year old dude in sunglasses screaming like he’s about to jump off the balcony in his Sophomore-year dorm is kind of creepy.
The thing about the music of the Grateful Dead in 1969 is that they were still improvising essentially by repeating a short phrase with variations. They had some good songs, like “St. Stephen”, which is musically fantastic and lyrically psychedelic to the max if not particularly meaningful. Most of the tunes were essentially just excuses for the aforementioned primitive jamming. “Dark Star” allowed instrumental wheedling and deelding on a chord, and “Turn On Your Lovelight” offers Ron McKernan the chance to hop up and down like he’s James Brown for a half an hour. It’s fine. Hippies would certainly use the most violent power they have, ostracism, to thwart my disdain, and I wouldn’t blame them. “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” is phenomenally performed. The feedback jam is enjoyable, and you have to appreciate the Dead inflicting such noise on parents of hippies and on “hippies” everywhere.
Good improvisation develops harmonically, structurally, melodically, in the same fashion as any good piece of music. Simply repeating a short phrase while one player improvises melodically is essentially performing a composition, and a poor one at that, even if the phrase has not been previously determined.
The problem is really not that the music is limited compared to the Dead’s later output, but that it’s limitations mean that any attempt to understand what is truly happening has to be primarily concerned with the social context of San Fransisco in the late Sixties, which has already been written about by Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson. It would be wiser to think about other such culturally driven music works, like early bluegrass, or punk rock, which aren’t nearly as played out.
A number of Grateful Dead albums succeed specifically on musical grounds, like Workingman’s Dead, Wake of the Flood, Terrapin Station,and American Beauty. The last is the album people will point to as the Dead’s classic studio album, but I find songs such as “Operator” and “Til the Morning Comes” drag down “Ripple” and “Box of Rain” a little too much.
As a result, I’m not convinced one can investigate any single classic Grateful Dead album on purely musical grounds.
I’m going to try to “get serious” about writing. We’ll see how that goes.
At the moment, I’m trying to convince myself, followed by Continuum International Publishing Group, followed by 5,000 or so lucky customers, that I can write a book about a great album. Strictly speaking, according to the call for proposals, the album does not have to be great.
The albums I’m considering are:
Cat Power - Moon Pix
Bjork - Vespertine
The Evens - The Evens
Smog - Knock Knock
OP8 - Slush
Robert Wyatt - Rock Bottom
Shania Twain - Come On Over
The Cure - The Head on the Door
Tom Ze, who doesn’t have a “that’s the one” album
The Grateful Dead - Live / Dead
They Might Be Giants - Lincoln
What else? There are probably a hundred more. I feel vaguely competent to approach these albums, unlike, for example, The Talking Heads’ Remain In Light. None of the bands have yet been covered in the 33 1/3 series, and none are in the list of 50 bands which have been proposed already. All of these are universal - these are not sounds that precisely fit some crack in my psyche, like the chewed up gum of the Moldy Peaches or Glenn Branca’s hundred year flood.
That last point is important, because the book really does have to induce 5,000 people to drop the price of 10 mp3s for it. I imagine that about 70% of the choice to purchase rests on the album in question - except in cases like Colin Meloy’s memoirish account of The Replacements’ Let it Be. The big sellers seem to be books about an album adored by either a small, information-starved audience (eg Neutral Milk Hotel’s fans), or a massive audience, some of which prefers the format of these books to the 30 other books about a given artist (Bob Dylan).
Cat Power’s Moon Pix is a good choice. It’s a set of eleven pure knockout songs. The story of Chan Marshall moving to Prosperity, South Carolina and waking up out of nightmares and into half a dozen songs is a classic, even if it’s fairly well known at this point. The audience is large, and still growing, but information is scarce - only one book about the band turns up on Amazon.com.
Moon Pix is the “that’s the one” Cat Power album. I don’t necessarily have to say it’s the best, although it is, just that it represents her major turning point of departure. (I think there might be a Robert Wyatt song in that sentence.) Before it, Cat Power was an OK indie rock band, not the great singer and watched artist that she has been since.
I remember being just hammered by this album when I put it on in my blue Geo Prizm, sitting in a parking lot on the Pacific Coast Highway. It combines real lyrics, gooey underwater instrument playing, and Chan Marshall singing like she is overcome by the “Black Sleep of Kali Ma”. What?
On the other hand, the harmonic structures and recording methods are not particularly inspiring on this one. There are great sounds and great performances, but writers generally approach sounds and singing by pouring syrup over them and brushing off the flies. “Chan Marshall’s evocative warbling creates a distinct unease in her transfixed auditors, while her greasy guitar-slinging curdles their milkshakes in a manner that can only be termed heavenly.” My favorite music book is The Beatles as Musicians, by Walter Everett, who is interested in the Beatles as musicians, not just as story-fodder. Everett approaches the album as a work with an inherent meaning, for which the history and personalities only offer us context.
Feel free to suggest other albums I should write about.
The Weakerthans - Reunion Tour (hear “Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure”)
A song like “Virtute…” succeeds by thinly veiling heartbroken sentiments - really just deadly thoughts - behind patient obfuscation and understatements.
Too much of the album over-obfuscates while just barely missing sentiment, but you have to credit The Weakerthans for trying to write about interesting things, like the smelly reunion tour of an old biggest band in the world, or a bigfoot-obsessed burger-flipper somewhere past the arctic circle.
Can I draft-dodge to Canada without there actually being a draft? My impression is that in Canada people listen to this kind of stuff all the time.
